Our book today is another Victorian masterpiece of melodrama, Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben-Hur. Sub-titled A Tale of the Christ, it was an immediate hit upon publication, sold in record-setting numbers on four continents, and was very quickly translated into virtually every language on Earth (several different classes of college undergraduates vied for the dubious honor of being the first to translate the whole thing into Latin, of course, and there’s been at least one Gaelic version). It tells the story of handsome young Judah Ben-Hur, a “prince of Jerusalem” during the earliest years of the Roman Empire, who lives in a palace with his mother and his sister Tirzah, and whose best boyhood friend princeling, a well-born young Roman named Messala.

The two were once inseparable best friends (and, oddly, lookalikes) while playing together in Jerusalem, but then Messala was sent away to finishing school in Rome itself, and when he came back, Judah found his opinions quite changed:

“By the drunken son of Semele, what it is to be a Jew! To him there is no backward, no forward; he is what his ancestor was in the beginning. In this sand I draw you a circle – there! Now tell me what more a Jew’s life is? Round and round, Abraham here, Isaac and Jacob yonder, God in the middle. And outside the circle’s little space, is there nothing of value? Painting, sculpture? To look upon them is sin. Poetry you make fast to your altars. Except in the synagogue, who of you attempts eloquence? In war all that you conquer in the six days you lose on the seventh. Satisfied with the worship of such a people, what is your God to our Roman love, who sends us his eagles that we may compass the world with our arms?”

Needless to say, this sort of thing ends their friendship (although, in one of Wallace’s many unjustly overlooked narrative subtleties, Messala remains high-spirited and likable even post-fascism). And in an abrupt crack in the story, we next find Judah Ben-Hur as a rowing slave on a Roman vessel. We learn that he was falsely accused of trying to assassinate a Roman official, and that Messala himself arrested his old friend and banished him to slavery, shuttered the palace in Jerusalem, and cast Judah’s mother and sister into a dank dungeon, promptly forgetting about them. While in the dungeon, a creeping horror overtakes Judah’s loved ones, described with Wallace’s perfect combination of clinical detachment and melodramatic pacing:

Once – she could not have told the day or the year, for down in the haunted hell even time was lost – once the mother felt a dry scurf in the palm of her right hand, a trifle: which she tried to wash away. It clung; yet she thought but little of the sign till Tirzah complained that she, too, was attacked in the same way. The supply of water was scant, and they denied themselves drink that they might used it as a curative. At length the whole hand was attacked; the skin cracked open, the finger-nails loosened from the flesh. There was not much pain, chiefly a steadily increasing discomfort. Later their lips began to parch and seam. One day the mother, who struggled against the impurities of the dungeon with all ingenuity, thinking the malady was taking hold of Tirzah’s face, led her to the light, and saw with anguish and terror that the young girl’s eyebrows were white as snow.

Speechless, motionless, the mother was capable of but one thought – leprosy!

Meanwhile, Judah is moving from one adventure to the next. Readers encountering Ben-Hur for the first time will be struck by the weird, seemingly unconscious way Wallace fluctuates between a kind of clean, readable, slightly archaic diction and the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ of the more torrid historical romances of the day – and seeing that fluctuation, those readers will probably think Ben-Hur could be quite a slog. But re-reading the book really brings home the fact that the pace never appreciably slows down – we carom with Judah from galley slavery to prosperity in Rome to the crash and flash of competitive chariot-racing to the visceral crunch and dodge of the gladiatorial arena. Judah isn’t a particularly contemplative sort; his main goals in life are determining the whereabouts of his family and extracting some kind of vengeance on Messala. Along the way, he meets the prosperous merchant Simonides (whose previous connection to Judah’s family is evoked, again, with more subtlety than any thousand readers would ever credit to this author), his lovely – and Judah-smitten – daughter Esther, the boisterously vulgar Sheik Ilderim, and a host of minor characters who are often brought effectively to life merely through snatches of dialogue. Also along the way, in the template for The Life of Brian, we see Judah’s life intersect with that of Jesus Christ at various key points; the two come closer and closer to each other (needless to say, Jesus has a trick up his sleeve about all that leprosy business), until finally, in the book’s final third, this really does become what it most certainly hadn’t been before: a tale of the Christ.

In many ways, it’s a deeply odd story, conflicted on its most basic levels, and to that extent it probably mirrors the internal state of its author. Ben-Hur made Wallace rich, but long before he wrote it he was already famous – infamous, more like it, dating from the Battle of Shiloh in 1862 when he inexplicably bungled some fairly simple but vital marching orders from Ulysses Grant. When everybody in the North was later appalled by the sheer scope of the carnage at Shiloh, Grant promptly blamed Wallace and kept right on blaming him – in print – for the rest of his life (despite hat-in-hand personal appeals Wallace made to the great man on more than one occasion).

It was a mark of Lew Wallace’s stubbornness – or maybe his patriotism – that although this public flaying over Shiloh made him incredibly distressed (toward the end of his life, you could hear his stomach ulcers from clear across a crowded room) it never made him bitter; he kept on serving under Grant, and he kept on giving, as the popular parlance has it, 110 percent. This was never more evident than in 1864 when Wallace, in command of 5000 untested and homesick troops, realized he was the only thing standing between Confederate General Jubal Early’s 15,000 men and Washington, D.C. Staring in horror at his maps, Grant had hastily ordered reinforcements to the capital, but Early was going to get there first and deal an immeasurable psychological blow to the Union but draping the Confederate flag out the White House windows.

Wallace didn’t hesitate. He took in the horrific logistical nightmare of the terrain available to him, stretched his men out like a shoe-string between the two ends of  Early’s most likely approach, and dug in.

It was hopeless, and even a relatively small flex of Early’s force soon crumpled Wallace’s line and sent him fleeing – but his men gave a good fierce account of themselves. Early was unsettled by the encounter. Not only was he unwilling to leave such a fighting force still active in his rear, but the fighting itself had cost him just enough time to make the whole thing undoable. Like Moses, he could glimpse the Promised Land (in this case, being able to see the Capital through his field glasses), but he couldn’t enter it. He withdrew, and the South never got that chance again.

Wallace should have been feted as the hero of the war, but his shame over Shiloh continued to gnaw at him. And you can tell that from Ben-Hur even if you don’t know what you’re looking for. The book is one long aria of disillusionment; Judah, though brave and idealistic, has one injustice after another heaped upon him, always with salvation just out of reach. One of the Three Wise Men is speaking a Lew Wallace credo when he says “The happiness of love is in action; its test is what one is willing to do for others.” And you can have a clear, one-shot view into Wallace’s entire concept of himself (justified or not) but another baldly-stated platitude: “As a rule, there is no surer way to the dislike of men than to behave well where they have behaved badly.”

Grappling with these personal demons may have given Lew Wallace a generally unhappy life, but the sheer energy of the struggle made Ben-Hur one hell of a compelling book. Then and now.